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# Software Engineer - GPU Kernel

- **Company:** FriendliAI Corp.
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Experienced
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, C++ (Programming Language), Nvidia CUDA, Computer Programming, Computer Engineering, Performance Tuning, Software Engineering, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Gpu Programming, Numerical Computing, Information Technology, Low Latency, HuggingFace, Free and Open-Source Software, ROCm, Model Inference, CUTLASS
- **Published:** November 3, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.careerbuilder.com/job-details/software-engineer-gpu-kernel-san-francisco-ca--b83fcc19-3853-43c0-8f96-2e81dcb23e56

## About the Role

Software Engineering, Kernel Programming, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), Funding, Kernel Programming, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Inference Engine, Performance Tuning/Optimization, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), * 3+ years of experience in GPU programming, HPC, or performance-critical systems

 * Bachelor's or Master's degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field
 * Strong proficiency in CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs or ROCm/HIP for AMD GPUs
 * Deep understanding of GPU architecture: warps, threads, memory hierarchy, synchronization, and latency-throughput trade-offs
 * Proficiency in C++
 * Experience with GPU profiling and performance tuning
 * Strong numerical background with understanding of precision trade-offs and quantization techniques, * Experience optimizing transformer, multi-modal, or Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures at the kernel level
 * Familiarity with the latest GPU libraries and frameworks (CUTLASS, Triton, …)
 * Inter-GPU communication programming experience
 * Open-source contributions related to GPU performance or ML acceleration
 * Research or conference presentations on GPU optimization, HPC, or numerical computing

## Description

FriendliAI is looking for a GPU Kernel Engineer to design, build, and optimize the low-level compute kernels that power our large-scale, GPU-accelerated AI inference platform. You will be delivering world-class inference speed across NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. With our recent $20M funding, we are scaling our team to meet market demand.

This is a deeply technical, high-impact role where you will write GPU code, implement advanced optimizations. As part of our engine team, you will contribute directly to the company's proprietary inference engine which supports over 600,000 models on Hugging Face. You will work with the inventors of continuous batching and collaborate with the platform team to deploy your work into production., * Design, implement, and optimize high-performance GPU kernels for AI inference (e.g., GEMM, attention, routing)

 * Develop and maintain GPU code in CUDA and C++, including low-level assembly when needed
 * Implement reduced-precision and quantized kernels (FP8/FP4) for low-latency or high-throughput inference
 * Benchmark and ensure cross-vendor performance parity between NVIDIA and AMD hardware
 * Contribute to internal GPU libraries and tune performance of performance-critical components
 * Accelerate multi-modal model pipelines
 * Investigate and integrate next-generation GPU features